Round the Wrekin

I’ve been struggling to write a paper for a conference.
It’s not that I don’t want to do it. I do. It’s not that I’m not interested in what I have to say. I am. The problem is that I know exactly what I am going to say. I could stand there and talk the thing without notes and nail it in forty five minutes. Writing it seems tedious.
A plod from point to point.

Dammit: I should have lived in an oral culture.

Writing is interesting when it starts to reveal things, slides down side alleys into weird little corners or suggests directions I hadn’t thought of. Can’t afford that here. Simply plodding; it’s just hard work.

Anyway that’ s my minor revelation and my excuse and I’m sticking to it until tomorrow, when I will have run out of time and will just have to write the damn thing.
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A man walks into the pub. He has two guitars. Later, when we go out for a break he accepts an invitation to play. I hear the unmistakable sounds of “Blackwater Side’. I’ve never heard it done live and never worked out how to do it. I wander back in to listen.

I’m seventeen again, back home in my bedroom in Coventry, the window’s open and it’s a warm summer afternoon. I’m sitting with the Eko, the familiar smell of its dark fragrant interior, the slightly sick smell of steel strings, the relaxed feel of that slightly curved fretboard. I'm staring hard at a John Renbourne song book, trying to learn his version of Jansch’s “Reynadine”. (and failing)

Later, we talk. It’s a conversation consisting entirely of snatches of guitar music, verses of songs, titles, names. Shorthand. Things I didn’t know I had remembered.
I knew I should have lived in an oral society.

I come away feeling vindicated. Earthed. Driving home in the dark feeling as if I’ve just been gifted with the permission to touch something old and solid.

A gentle reminder of something valued, the suggestion that it can be taken out in public once in a blue moon. Not lost, or forgotten, just waiting around patiently.
*
Having knocked the new writing project into a mini shape to see what it looks like, I can have a break (when the conference paper is written, Liam, only when you’ve written the conference paper.) Since the project is a narrative, I read S/z, which is one of the most enjoyable books I can remember reading. Talk about reading as discovery. And Narrative Discourse, which doesn’t quite have the gleeful élan of s/z but which I thoroughly enjoyed. Applying these two now to Carmilla, to see how that story works, to see if I’ve got the ideas sorted in my head and to rediscover the story.

All this to cycle back to “For All We Know” in the hopes of it answering some questions for me which will then feed into the writing project. Round the wrekin, I'd admit, but that's often the best way to get anywhere.

Hurm.

Why can’t poeting be as social as traditional music. Set question for Mr. C. Carson.

Any singer in any bar, singing traditional songs.

The songs obviously pre exist. Not just the performance but my life time. Have pre existed for a century or two in some cases. And hopefully, the good ones will continue to exist, despite the often crude treatment they receive at my hands.

We are after all merely custodians, doing our best. In this and in so much else. Hopefully, leaving something worth passing on. Beyond fashion or style or commerce.

But the singer is erased in the song. There’s obviously an art involved but it’s the art of effacing self, allowing voice to becomes vehicle and letting the story unroll.

As soon as he or she starts to sing ”I had a first cousin called Arthur MacBride” that first pronoun swallows ego; the singer is leaning across a bar, or a table, or sitting in their rocking chair, telling some button holed wedding guest the story of that memorable encounter, not as an historian or a journalist, but as eyewitness and participant.

In payment for which the magical lift, and the chance to rise on the glorious defiance of that song’s conclusion.

In the traditional love songs, the singer once again disappears, becomes reconstituted as the space between the hand reaching out to the lover, and the lover who smiles in welcome: this most human of gestures endlessly repeated across time and space.

The details of the stories encode the feeling: specifics and universals inseparable: gesture, and thought, act and emotion polished and passed along.

Anyone who says the song is irrelevant because the maid laments for her Bonnie Light Horse man killed in the Napoleonic wars has missed the point. The roguish beggarman who rises after a night of enjoyable sex with the woman he’s tricked (who may not seem so admirable once the song has finished) finds his way into today’s papers: the young girl waiting for her lover to come home from the sea or from the wars becomes the man or woman whose partner has been posted to Afghanistan.

The song suspends judgement and leaves that to the audience.

It don’t need to be rewritten or updated. It don’t need to be “modernized or glamorized”. Just treated with respect and passed on.

Which raises the interesting question: how the hell to write poems that do that.

Dream, semiotic, symbolic

The modern English “Dream” comes from the old English noun Dream: gladness delight, ecstasy, mirth, rejoicing, melody, music, singing, minstrelsy.
The verb dryman, means to sing aloud or to rejoice. Though the noun drymann means a sorcerer or magician. Music as magic.

So the obsolete meanings in English: Joy/pleasure, gladness/mirth rejoicing…the sound of musical instruments/music. Melody, minstrelsy melody noise sound.

Music as dream, as sorcery, time travel, rejoicing. Mirth. A dream of something worth while and very ancient.

Up the mountain to play on a Friday night for a change. I’ve driven that road almost every Sunday for three or four years. I’ve driven down in the dark so many times, but never up. The familiar road now totally unfamiliar; disorientating. Somehow it evokes so many night drives the car curves upwards and time starts to slip.

The pub sits on a slight rise; light streaming from windows. Smoke from the chimney. The moon’s up. Walking in from the car park; the dark wall broken by the windows which frame colour and light inside; outside dark quiet, cold. Crossing an abrupt threshold, into light and noise; music and voices. In daylight there is liminal space. Here there are borders/edges/abrupt transitions. It’s like falling asleep and entering a different space which seems to have come unmoored from its context.

We play. We dream: rejoice, celebrate, laugh. Make music. But also dream in the modern sense: caught in fluid dislocations of time. Song is Kristeva’s semiotic, but the songs and the singer co-exist in monumental time. Singing as time travel, diving into the song and finding only other songs and memories of their performance… words and melody unreeling images: Molly Malone, the tart with the cart. In the rare old times, we ride on to the red rose café where I tell the story of my cousin, Arthur Macbride and what we did to the recruiting sergeant. Leaving Liverpool via fisherman’s green we meet Captain Farrel, wishing he was back home in Derry, who is doomed yet again to get held up in some dirty old town.

If this were a dream then the narrative would slide around a corner and looking up I’ll find myself back in the Fisherman’s arms in Golant twenty years ago. But in the real world, in monumental time, I am still there, in the fisherman’s arms, twenty years ago, Mick’s coming back from the bar with the drinks and the rowing club boys are making so much noise I can’t hear my guitar, let alone tune it. Who cares. It’s a Friday night. The moon’s up. We will stagger home later, up Harry’s hill, pausing to look down at the moonlight on the boats moored in the Fowey.

If we’re lucky the Owl will be sitting on the gate.

After Ten O’clock the place empties out. The bar becomes a score after the orchestra have left the stage. Even the light seems tired and flat, unable to shine off anything. The echoes have retreated to the corners, unable to sound. It’s a comfortable space. A few late arrivals wander in and ask if there is any music.

Driving down the mountain, far too tired, what a friend used to call road stoned. drifting round the bends, drifting in and out of memories of night drives and night conversations, not really sure If I’m awake at all.

I’m convinced I’ve just been to Heorot.

Fortunately, I’m home, parked, asleep, before Grendle or his mum can put in an appearance.